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Solutions

The opportunities to profit from commercialising forest products promise to improve livelihoods in the rural Amazon, but only if local communities have ownership over the ways in which their resources are exploited. This policy brief examines case studies in Bolivia, Brazil and Peru with the aim to establish the importance of genuinely equitable partnerships in local forest management schemes.

In each study area two communities were selected as case studies: one negotiating its timber rights with logging companies and one receiving support from a development agency to adopt community forest management. It finds that 96% of the communities informally negotiated timber rights with loggers; in contrast, less than 2% participated in community forestry initiatives, and most abandoned the management practices once external support ceased. This is due to:

• high implementation costs of community forestry
• development agencies' paternalistic way of dictating priorities
• the relatively low financial return of community forestry

The authors argue that local initiatives turn out to be the only successful way towards community forestry, but are often stifled by communities' dependence on development agencies and other external actors. It is recommended that therefore, development agencies should:

• build a framework of non-intensive support for many communities rather than focusing on expensive pilot projects
• allow communities to develop local concepts of forest use
• allow local regulatory systems to emerge

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